The European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages

The European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages (EPOSTL) is a document for students undergoing initial teacher education. It will encourage you to reflect on your didactic knowledge and skills necessary to teach languages, helps you to assess your own didactic competences and enables you to monitor your progress and to record your experiences of teaching during the course of your teacher education.

Contents of the EPOSTL

The EPOSTL contains the following sections:
• A personal statement section to help you, at the beginning of your teacher education, to reflect on general questions related to teaching;
• A self-assessment section, consisting of ‘can-do’ descriptors, to facilitate refl ection and selfassessment;
• A dossier, in which you can make the outcome of your self-assessment transparent, to provide evidence of progress and to record examples of work relevant to teaching;
• A glossary of the most important terms relating to language learning and teaching used in the EPOSTL;
• An index of terms used in the descriptors;
• A users’ guide which gives detailed information about the EPOSTL.

11th METU International ELT Convention

11th METU International ELT Convention is going to be held on the dates 31 May - 02 June 2012 in Ankara, Turkey. The 11th Convention is based on the theme "Embracing Challenges". The website of the Convention is www.dbe.metu.edu.tr/convention2012.

The 5th International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca

The 5th International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca will be held at Boğaziçi University, Faculty of Education, Department of Foreign Language Education, Istanbul, Turkey from May 24 to 26, 2012. For further information, please visit the conference homepage:  http://www.elf5.org/index.php

Pronunciation

Our freshman student, Emre Berçin has prepared some mp3 files that may help his friends, who try to improve their pronunciation abilities. Click here to download the files.

Good work Emre.

Improving Your English Listening Skills

When you first start working on your listening skills it is best to do a lot of passive listening. Listening to English podcasts is a great way to start improving your English comprehension. Listening to radio stations is another way of improving your listening skill. You can download players and find links to online radio stations at real.com, windowsmedia.com and winamp.com.

Films in English are excellent language resources. If your English is elementary, try some children's films, or get films with English subtitles. If you're at an intermediate or advanced level, the sky's the limit. You can find some English videos from the net. Some websites like 5min.com or startcooking.com are listed on the right column of this blog. Listening whilst reading is a good idea too. There are lots of audio books in our library.

Keep up to date with current events and watch an English-language news channel, such as BBC World or CNN World. Watch news reports on events you are already aware of.

7th International ELT Research Conference-Çanakkale

On 27-28 April 2012, the 7th International ELT Research Conference will be held in Çanakkale/Turkey. Click here for more information.

IATEFL Annual International Conference and Exhibition

The 46th IATEFL Annual International Conference and Exhibition will be held in Glasgow on 19-23rd March, in the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. Click here to get more details.